No Need to Suffer Silently…

In the midst of our conversion to the Weimar era, it’s easy to think that a 2015 album couldn’t possibly have anything to be anxious about. The economy was finally back from the recession, racism was dead (or so we were told), and billionaires were incredibly invested in green energy. Oh, the halcyon days of not worrying about oligarchy. But the lightness of that time is what made Viet Cong’s self-titled debut so shocking and abrasive: were people really this upset? And why? Their answer: yes, and because everything.

There’s no discussion of Viet Cong—who have since changed their name to Preoccupations after some…rather misplaced, often furious, cancel-culture-y complaints about their initial call sign—without first discussing the band Women.

Formed in Calgary in 2007 by brothers Matt and Patrick Flegel (Matt is in Viet Cong/Preoccupations, while Patrick now performs as Cindy Lee, who you might recognize as creating a 2024 year’s best album, Diamond Jubilee), Christopher Reimer, and Mike Wallace (no, not that Mike Wallace), Women was an underground counter-culture version of the 2000’s post-punk revival. While bands like Interpol and Bloc Party were interested in the clean production and poppy grooves of the most successful post-punk bands, Women were lo-fi, jagged, and their only goal was to give you a migraine.

Not to say they weren’t good. Quite the contrary, Women’s songwriting is very good, but much like MGMT going full-on acoustic psych to get away from tweens, Women did not want you to fall over them. They were…the Lars Von Trier of post-punk, if that scans.

The band’s two albums are considered by many music critics to be the standard of no wave-inspired post-punk. And that album cover for Public Strain? * chef’s kiss * Never before have I seen album art so exact to my imagination of Calgary while also perfectly conveying what the album will sound like. But one on-stage fight later, and the band was essentially over. Then, with the untimely passing of Reimer, the entire project was cancelled.

In the wake of that depressive period, Pat Flegel and Mike Wallace (again, not that Mike Wallace) would form Viet Cong, and their sound would be as dark and icy as a Calgary funeral.

Newspaper Spoons

Wallace’s intense drums open the album, run through a glut of effects, filters, and processors, giving their tribal, warlike delivery the degraded feel of Stalker’s Zone. Flegel’s vocals enter in a chant to match the marching drums, though what he’s chanting is disturbing in a non-tangible way. The words don’t seem to really mean anything, but how they feel is full of dread. The song ends with the drums fading away, as the distortion clears and a vaguely pleasant set of keyboards enters, glittering to a clean finish.

Pointless Experience

Again Wallace’s drums enter, but this time more in a recognizable song pattern, followed by this album’s signature drone effect, then, finally, the debut of Flegel’s bass guitar, riding up and down in a very post-punk line. The chorus features some of Flegel’s best existentially terrifying musings on modern life: “Failed to keep the necessary papers for evacuation / Hideously synchronized with cold an cruel arithmetic.” His stumbling deliveries in the verses seem like they shouldn’t fit, given the extensive multisyllabic vocabulary, but somehow Flegel jams a half-word into every available nook and cranny—a trademark of his throughout the band’s catalog. The song comes to an abrupt end to drop us into…

March of Progress

“March of Progess” is the first trial you must pass on the way to Viet Cong acceptance. It is over six minutes, and a least one third of that run time is a hyper-repetitive—if very slickly performed and produced—drum pattern played over high-ptiched static, like an ear ringing. The pattern cuts out to leave Daniel Christiansen’s guitar plucks (played above the fret board for an eerie, autoharp sound), while Flegel’s chanting returns, this time sounding more like a brainwashed husk as he reports the “benefits” of the “incessant march of progress.” This then changes again, into a polyrhythm of jangle pop guitars over a very post-punky drum kit. It’s also the first time we here Flegel’s voice essentially in the clear, and his near-falsetto rings out another set of absolute stunners: “We play the life secure with give and take / We build the buildings and their built to break / Tell me, tell me, tell it to me, tell it straight / What is the difference between love and hate?” The drums build more and more as the guitars seem to trip over each other until, finally, the triptych is complete.

Bunker Buster

The second trial, is “Bunker Buster.” The intro is some of the most jarringly angular guitar work I’ve heard outside of a Jesus Lizard song, alternating sporadically between a cool, soothing bass, and seemingly random stabs of piercing guitar chords. When the drums kick in, the track finds a more standard sound…comparatively, but it is driving hard and won’t stop for any passengers. Flegel’s lyrics are another semi- word salad aimed more at getting the feeling across than a concrete message, but the existential dread behind them is as omnipresent as it is anywhere else on the album. The finale sees the sound of the band tearing at the seams as Flegel screams “What side are you on, man?” A great question, and one that seems to be shouted more and more as time goes on.

Continental Shelf

If you’ve heard of Viet Cong, or Preoccupations, it’s probably because of this song. It opens with a glistening array of guitars switching from left to right ear, before settling down into a massive wall of shoegaze noise for the verses. Flegel’s lyrics are probably his most clearly delivered of the album, and speak of the terrible toll of isolation, both societal and self-imposed. “Don’t wanna face the world / It’s suffocating, suffocating,” he shouts in the pre-chorus, before calmly reciting his centering mantra: a hallucinatory description of a Dali painting. The delivery of every part makes it one of the band’s greatest tracks, calm and collected in a storm of angst and noise.

Silhouettes

Getting to the “punk” of post-punk, “Silhouettes” gets straight to the point, as more angular guitars kick in right in your face with no chance to prepare. The lyrics are Flegel describing what he sees people doing in the crowd of the band’s shows: “Overwhelmed by all the drunken silhouettes / Entertained by their broken cassettes;” and “Uncontrollable spontaneous tirades / Trying to unmake all of the things that are made.” The chorus is a wind-up rager with guitars being picked as hard as possible, while the drums blast out explosions on the beat. If there was a headbanger in the band’s discography, this would be it.

Death

Your third and final trial is the gauntlet of “Death,” aptly named. At over 11 minutes, it’s one the band’s longest songs, and like “March of Progress” earlier, it also comes in various movements. The first section begins with those angular guitars again, and is calming musically, though Flegel’s vocal delivery is harsh, strained, and powerful, like he just can’t hold it back anymore. This then morphs into the second part, a loud robotic, almost-stoner rock passage of mechanically precise drumming and increasingly loud guitars. Static and feedback start to creep into the mix and the playing gets more frenetic disorganized…always propelled by the endless drum. Then wham! Tempo change. The song slows down considerably to allow the players time to revel in big massive stabs of rocking noise that would be more at home in an early Ty Segall record. Then whoop! Back to super speed as Flegel rattles off what he sees in the rat race of humanity: empty shell people shuffling like they’re told to…like how the drums are telling him to. Then wham! Time change! The drums are more free, jazz like, though still very much pounding, and the band is speeding up, and up, and up. Flegel shifts his delivery from drone to expressive shouting.

Unable to contain his emotion anymore, he screams over one last slow-down, reciting Nietzsche at a throat-shredding level: “What does deep midnight’s voice contend / Deeper than day can comprehend? / Accelerated fall, and orbital sprawl / Expanded and swollen.” I mean, what would you scream into the endless expanse?

Viet Cong is a mystery box that allows you to find whatever it is you want inside. Do you want heavy rock? Or perhaps the moodiness of post-punk is more your speed? Do you want the singer to guide you, nebulously, on a journey of deep, dark feelings? Or maybe you’d like them to espouse modern philosophy while pulling no punches? Does your music need to be emotional? Or would you prefer the expressionless wash of the echo of time?

It’s all here, if you would just embrace the void.

Happy listening!